(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump likened the UK government’s demand that Apple grant it access to some user data as “something that you hear about with China,” in an interview with The Spectator political magazine published Friday.
Trump said that he had told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that he “can’t do this”, referring to the request for access to data. The two met at the White House on Thursday for the first time since the U.S. leader took office, discussing Ukraine and negotiating a bilateral trade agreement.
“We actually told him (Starmer) … that’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China,” Trump said in his first magazine interview of his second term with the magazine’s editor-at-large Ben Domenech.
A spokesperson for the British government said “we have a close intelligence relationship with the U.S. and we take the partnership seriously” but did not comment on the specifics of the Apple case. The company did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Apple last week ended an advanced security encryption feature for cloud data for UK users in an unprecedented response to government demands for access to user data. A spokesperson for Britain’s Home Office had then declined to comment on whether such an order had been issued.
In a letter dated February 25 to two U.S. lawmakers, Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, said the U.S. is examining whether the UK government had violated the CLOUD Act, which bars it from issuing demands for the data of U.S. citizens and vice versa.
The Spectator, which is influential in Conservative circles and was previously edited by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was bought last year by British hedge fund founder Paul Marshall.
(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City and Suban Abdulla in London; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)
